Jay Leno: Revenge of the Everyman

Twice Jay Leno has gone up against NBC executives willing to get rid of him, and twice he has pulled out a win. Both times he worked toward victory with the help of a deceptive ploy.

On the night of January 6, 1992, in a feat of corporate espionage chronicled in Bill Carter’s book on the late-night wars, The Late Shift, Leno hid in a closet-like office beneath his Burbank studio to listen in on a conference call taking place among NBC executives. They were discussing who should follow Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show—Leno or David Letterman. While they argued, Leno took notes “on what people thought of him and his show,” Carter reported. “Best of all he knew exactly who was for him and who was against him.”

Cut to July 21 of this year. With the forced retirement of Leno starting to make less and less sense, given his continued dominance in the ratings, he put on a disguise—bald wig, glasses, goatee—and showed up at an NBC press conference with phony credentials. Amazingly, as IFmagazine.com reported at the time, he was the one who asked the question that broke the news of when, exactly, his own final installment of Tonight would take place.

Jay Leno: When is Leno’s last show?

NBC Universal co-chairman Marc Graboff: Well, I figure we’ll get right to that. Jay’s last show will be May 29, 2009. That’s a Friday. And Conan’s first show as host of The Tonight Show will be on June 1, 2009—the next Monday night.

Leno: Will Leno be paid for the rest of the year?

Graboff: Yeah, sure. Sure.

Leno: Now, Brett Favre retired and then wanted to come back, and the Packers said no. What do you make of that?

Graboff: Well, everyone’s entitled to change their mind, but I would imagine that puts management in an impossible situation.

The act of disguising himself to put one of his own bosses on the spot was seen as a somewhat unfunny stunt, but it had the effect of focusing attention on the absurdity of NBC’s late-night plan at a time when Leno and his publicist were not willing to discuss his future on the record. As he had done in 1992, Leno was drawing on his not-to-be-underestimated survival skills, letting his bosses and other interested parties know he wasn’t about to go down without a fight.

Leno has two sides seemingly in conflict with each other: the affable everyman who delivers broad jokes to an audience of 4.8 million viewers almost every night of the week; and the steely corporate survivor. But his ability to outmaneuver executives by playing rough is rooted in the same lunch-bucket quality that has made him so popular: he’s willing to work hard, to outlast everyone else, to give that 110-percent effort harped on by football coaches everywhere, even if it means ignoring propriety from time to time. And this willingness to work—to perform in Vegas and in comedy clubs on nights when he’s not on the air; to gladhand his audience; to sit down with affiliates—only adds to his everyman status. Like most people, Leno is not built for speed so much as he is built to last.

He has said he will give up the desk when he starts doing his prime-time show. Right now, it’s hard to picture how he’ll navigate the stage without having a desk to anchor the proceedings. On the other hand, he has never been a great interviewer—especially when it comes to actors and actresses. Letterman will generate a genuine conversation from time to time, even with Paris Hilton, but Leno hews closely to agreed-upon, pre-interview material. It’s to his credit that, despite his fame and his hundreds of millions of dollars, he still seems more at ease talking with people in the street than he is interviewing Cate Blanchett.

The strongest part of The Tonight Show, its first half hour, has Leno standing at the lip of the stage, delivering way too many jokes in the hope that some of them will stick. That will remain intact at 10 p.m. His popular “Jay Walking” segment, which reveals the idiocy of Los Angeles pedestrians, has in recent years spun off a recurring game-show like sketch, “Battle of the Jaywalk All-Stars.” A more amped-up version of this kind of thing—with cash prizes—could easily be absorbed into what is tentatively called The Jay Leno Show.

Leno has built a nice team of supporting players. Ross the Intern, who delights in being out-there effeminate while doing red-carpet interviews, is a nimble foil to the pot-roast-like Leno. The host has also—wisely—made Wanda Sykes such a frequent guest that it seems like she’s on staff. Maybe NBC should give her a formal role on the 10 p.m. version. Sykes is a hit with comedy snobs, not only because of her sharp standup work but because of her role on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. She has a big following in the gay community (she recently came out) and she isn’t afraid to work in tough material from the political left, which plays nicely against Leno’s apathetic-regular-guy stance. Even when Barack Obama was on the campaign trail, Sykes managed to crack the code, figuring out a way to make him a subject of jokes that actually worked. And Leno is equally at ease with Sykes’s demographic opposite, Larry the Cable Guy. Throw in bandleader Kevin Eubanks, an African-American vegetarian pot-smoker, and the Leno crew may prove more diverse than Obama’s cabinet.

Leno was ill at ease when he took over The Tonight Show in 1992. But then he got rid of Johnny’s striped curtain, parted ways with too-hip-for-the-room bandleader Branford Marsalis, and renovated the stage so that he could deliver his monologue close to the people seated up front. With that, he started doing his own show.

It hasn’t been the most creative hour of television. “Jay Walking” rips off stuff Howard Stern did for years on the radio. “Headlines” goes back to Letterman’s bits of found comedy (“Small Town News,” “Dumb Ads”). A lot of Leno’s other material is generic. He rarely provides the kick of Jon Stewart and he’s a stranger to the territory of amusing absurdity that gives Conan O’Brien and Stephen Colbert their biggest laughs.

But Leno is a big-tent comedian, a wholesaler, a tireless salesman of LOL. In playing to the biggest crowd possible, he proves himself a small-d democrat. Like daytime hosts Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Regis Philbin—and very much unlike his fellow late-night comics—Leno is non-elitist and seems to have little in the way of artistic pretentions (or even artistic ambitions). He’s content to be a host who tells jokes. But that works. Most people prefer a home-cooked meal to gourmet fare.

Does that make him less interesting to watch than Letterman, O’Brien, Stewart, and Colbert? Yes! But Leno’s everyman thing isn’t just a pose meant to match the denim shirts he wears in his remote segments. And that’s a good fit for prime time.